Ebola is no laughing matter. Let’s make that clear from the start. It is a deeply unpleasant and dangerous disease, with a fatality rate of up to 90%. In lay terms, for every 10 people who get it, only 1 survives, making it among the most lethal diseases known to man.

There is no known cure or vaccine (although experimental drugs are being tried). The onset is sudden, but the incubation period ranges from 2 to 21 days, so if you’ve got it you won’t know straight away. And the symptoms are, frankly, horrific. Even the initial symptoms are unpleasantly flu-like (proper flu, not “don’t want to admit it’s just a cold” flu). Muscle pain, weakness, headache, sore throat, Ebola can cause all of these. And that’s just for starters. It quickly moves on to causing vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and sometimes both internal AND external bleeding. This blood loss invariably leads to death.

These details aren’t from some blog written by a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with worst-case scenarios. They are from the World Health Organisation Ebola factsheet, almost a textbook definition of a “reliable source”. All in all, the Ebola outbreak is awful, and those suffering from it deserve all possible support and sympathy for what they’re going through, while those trying to tackle the problem deserve all manner of praise and respect.

However, despite all the dreadful things about this outbreak, if you go by media coverage, the worst thing about it is that it might end up affecting people in the UK, US or similarly developed wealthy nations. And we can’t have that now, can we.

Actually, perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Thanks to 24-hour rolling news and the internet, those of us in the developed world are constantly spoiled for choice when it comes to hearing about how absolutely awful things are happening to people in other countries. With such a constant bombardment of bleak information, it is perhaps to be expected that people will prioritise and preferably want to hear about things that may directly impact their lives. But much of the media seems to have readily descended into scaremongering to gain readers/traffic, and we know how dangerous scaremongering can be.

Such scaremongering and provocative reporting can only harm public understanding and potentially jeopardise the effectiveness of any response to an actual occurrence of the disease, as some have noticed. As well as this, paranoia coupled with poor understanding leads people to act irrationally. I say this as someone who knows people who, during the early stages of the 2009 Mexican swine flu scare, cancelled a planned trip to a Chiquito restaurant in Cardiff, a Mexican themed eatery half a planet away from the affected area. There’s “cautious”, and there’s … whatever you’d call this.

However dangerous it may be, Ebola can (at present) only be contracted by exchanging fluids with an infected sufferer, through the mouth, eyes, nose or other access point to inside the body. Ebola is a tenacious virus and strict precautions must be taken when dealing with it. However, you’re not going to get it just because you were on the same landmass as someone who has it.

Having said all this, if the mainstream media will insist on scaremongering about Ebola, here are some terrifying “facts” about Ebola that they could use, with my blessing. Better they use those than scapegoat innocent people, I guess.

The Ebola virus can be up to 14,000 nanometres in length. That’s surprisingly large for a virus, but still too small to see with the naked eye. But if it were the size of a car, it could kill you if dropped on you from even a modest height!

Ebola is not the deadliest virus known to mankind in terms of number of overall deaths caused, but if it ends up causing more deaths than the deadliest virus known to mankind, then Ebola would be the deadliest virus known to mankind!

Some have reported that the Ebola outbreak could be much worse than is believed due to the full number of cases not being reported. However, if you’re basing conclusions on information we don’t have, there’s no limit to how many people might have Ebola. You, the one reading this, could have it right now! We don’t have any information to suggest otherwise, so who’s to know?

Vox recently reported that if the supercontinent Pangaea were to reform today, the US would border the Ebola epidemic locations, which would obviously make it easier for the virus to spread. While this may be true, we can take comfort from the fact that, if all the continents on Earth were to suddenly rearrange themselves, the resultant geological, environmental and societal devastation would achieve apocalyptic levels several times over, so a localised (if deadly) virus would be way down on the list of concerns for whatever is left of the human race at this point.

If you laid out all the recorded victims of Ebola end-to-end, the end result would be so horrific as to defy description, and you’d probably be arrested and/or placed in a high-security psychiatric facility for having done such a grotesque thing.

Some have claimed that homeopathy can be used to treat Ebola, but there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim. This still applies if you replace “Ebola” with TB or Aids or influenza or bronchitis or Sars or bird flu or swine flu or rhinovirus or Legionnaires’ disease or Parkinson’s or Huntington’s or gout or athletes foot or gum disease or gallstones or ME or cerebral palsy or kidney stones or heatstroke or arrhythmia or hypotension or hypertension or basically anything that is inconsiderate enough to be an actual illness with a biological mechanism.

Dean Burnett is best interacted with via the sterile environment of Twitter, @garwboy